I don't have a Wii but I have another Nintendo product that has made my life healthier: a DS Lite. I make it a point to go to the gym at least 4 times a week. But, my god, is it boring -- even with all the eye candy around.
Get a DS Lite, a gym membership, and a couple good turn-based game (I like Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advanced port and World Series of Poker for the DS side). I usually hit the stairclimber for 30 min and the cycles for 30 min.
10 min on the stairclimber used to feel like 30 min. Now 30 min feels like 5.
Who knew a video game company could end up being such a great promoter of exercise?
Can we get a source (i.e. to the polltaker itself) on the congress figure? I've heard it reported, but I'm curious about the wording of the question. I'm guessing it's approval of congress as a whole. Which is quite different than approval of your particular congressman.
I'm guessing that figure is higher. So that, for most of us, our will is probably being somewhat better reflected at the congressional level -- but we just have a bunch of conflicting wills out there.
Of course, the president is your particular president.
From the looks of the test selecting London all the time would have a 1/6 chance = 16.67% chance. Indeed, not very impressive for London.
Look at this guy's claim for basic audio analysis:
"Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That's my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets."
It's always nice to have a place to go on the internet when I need to see something totally mediocre, get my daily dose of unadulterated contempt and loathing, or just want to be mean myself.
Well put. Berners-Lee makes an interesting point about what would had happened had the web gone the privatization route a la Gopher.
Another interesting question (which I've asked before) is where would the web be without Gore's vision and support? I imagine, much the same place that Berners-Lee imagined.
Good points. I was joking with a Chinese friend about "evil Chinese" after reading about the online persecution of a Duke student in the NY Times yesterday.
She's not adamantly nationalist or anti-Tibeten but styles herself a pragmatist and thinks the pro-Tibet movement is a waste of time.
She made one point that I have not really heard mentioned elsewhere. She says the human rights issue is beside the point. Tibet is a vital water resource for China and for that reason, China is never going to let it go.
Rather than argue about their right to have the app, they simply pulled it so people wouldn't be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.
That to me would be the bigger story. Some (including myself) were quick to note this very issue in yesterday's thread announcing the new app engine service:
Build you new killer app, have it grow to the point where it takes advantage of the trumpeted scaling features of the service, then helplessly watch it disappear when Google PR feels it's "distracting people from what google wanted them talking about."
(I'm still working on Part I myself and didn't even get a trial account before they cut off new signups. But still...)
Having been burned by this with other Google services, this is my biggest concern about GAPE (is that what we're calling it?), despite what look like rather generous terms of service.
That said, I'm looking forward to trying this out. But I'm not planning to use it for anything I consider too important or can't keep mirrored on my own system. Be careful.
Then the technique would show up all over the place and get over-exposed.
And then it'd be dropped for the next shiny thing. Or it would prove itself something more than a novelty and get applied in ever more creative ways. Either way, as the./ tag likes to put it, nothing of value would be lost. In fact, there's a good chance a lot would be gained. And I'm sure the developer would still be profiting by it.
The lack of a patent on putting ink to paper has not seemed to have limited its significance or the ability of people to profit by it. (Though I guess you could argue that there have been restrictions as effective as a patent on it at various times and places throughout history. But rarely if ever for the general good.)
Sadly, as long as pretend-to-do-no-evil giant Google keeps encouraging and rewarding these shady practices, us regular guys are utterly powerless. It would take a tremendous concerted effort to outvote Google with our pitiful dollars.
I agree this is the crux of the problem. I wish Google would move against domain farming, but as parent points out, they're the industry leader.
Had a similar thing happen to me with a domain which I was using much like the OP. I had the.com version -- wasn't commercializing it in anyway. Let the registration lapse and it got vacuumed up by a domain farmer. I just registered the.net version. Then after a year, after the farmer probably lost money on it, the.com domain was free again and I re-registered it for a longer period with (what I hope is) a more reliable registrar, Yahoo.
OK granted "C-beams" and the Tannhauser Gate whatever that is sounds like total bullshit but that was way better than the graceless and forgettable voiceover from Harrison Ford that followed.
I always thought it was sea beams, which conjures up a slightly more poetic scene. But maybe he was talking about some ass-kick source code he once saw that would have blown Harrison Ford's mind.
I'm with you on the voice-over and its redundancy here.
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary).
I agree that custom plug-ins suck. But before they fix that, they should probably fix that typo:
To see the book pages of ULIB, please dowload free TIFF plugin or DjVu plugin
I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.
I've been wondering the same thing with regards to tablet PCs. One of the most exciting things about OLPC (which I have ordered through their special 1-for-2 program and, interestingly, came out to about $400) is the neat way (in the press release photos anyway), it folds into a sort of e-book. I guess it doesn't have all the same page-like rendering technology as Kindle. But, damn, even with that, the Kindle still looked on the cover of Time little better than a slightly stylized Speak-N-Spell.
If you really feel the need to provide some online persona for an employer, make a new one. Create a cute little profile on all the big social networking sites, and post carefully censored historical details of your life.
Good advice.
Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) is also handy for keeping tabs on what your online aliases are doing while you sleep. Sometimes I'm surprised to discover what they've been up to.
kcrw.com (I just listen to it on the radio, but they have an online counterpart.)
A lot of new (I assume, non-RIAA) music gets filtered to the American mainstream through here (e.g. Coldplay). Jesca Hoop is the latest indie star to come up through their farm system. Also discovered interesting DJ/mashup stuff like The Arbiters there. ("Sure Side of Fame" is a little masterpiece of the genre.)
Unfortunately, I suspect most the unknowns who do really break through eventually end up in the RIAA's net.
I believe Antonio Damasio addresses this question in one of his books. Apparently, a fortunate side-effect of this condition is it impairs the part of your brain that would normally find this horrific and intolerable and leaves you with a weird sense of acceptance and well-being (IIRC). Otherwise, I guess you just blink a lot and hope they keep the feeding tube hooked up.
Woohooo, I hope I still have that box of blank punch cards. I'm going to make a killing on eBay
A box of blank punch cards is actually the only thing I've ever bought off of eBay. I bought them as a Xmas gift for my grandma. She likes to use them as notecards.
My grandpa worked as a programmer in the aerospace industry for years and so she always had stacks of them around the house. Well, he retired about 20 years ago, and a couple years ago she was down to her last stack. So I bought a box for her. She loved it. Best Xmas gift I ever got for her.
In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran mentions this device in his discussion of psychological disorders. IIRC, he compares the sensation to those symptoms that are exhibited by individuals with a messiah complex.
He describes it as excessive emotional "kindling" (often associated with epilepsy -- the tact I believe Scorsese adopted in the Last Temptation of Christ) that leads one to invest spiritual significance in events and experiences most people would experience as ordinary or mundane.
Now place your God Helmet on your head and reread this post -- you'll see what I mean.
I don't begrudge Google their right to pick candidates according to whatever (lawful) criteria they prefer, but this is very well put:
I keep POINTERS to data, not data. isn't that the better way? it surely has served me well enough in my 20+ years in the field.
The truth is, however, that the most talented probably do the same -- it's just that more of the pointers point to internal locations in their heads instead of urls or indexes of books on their bookshelf. (I suppose there's a RAM / hard drive analogy in there somewhere.)
Then there is the sheer vigor of youth -- did you cram for two weeks before your interview? Me either.
Incidentally, Stephen Jay Gould agreed with you. I remember him in an interview once making a similar distinction in describing his own mental operating system.
I tend to confuse James Randi with Joe Nickell, whom the New Yorker profiled a few years ago (abstract here).
There's a blackly comic incident described in that article: Nickell is walking down some steps at a skeptics conference in the company of a group of skeptics. In a freak accident, he trips and badly breaks his leg. While he's writhing on the ground in pain, the skeptics are standing around him saying things like, "Are you sure it's broken?"
I remember his comment in the article being something like: "Yeah, sometimes you get tired of hanging around skeptics."
It was Ultima Online that was the basis of one of the earliest and most entertaining articles I read on MMORPGs: "Pimps and Dragons" by Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker. A quote from that article that still haunts me:
"Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used to," Garriott told me. "You have to realize that the world is what you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you're going to have a relatively mediocre life."
Bank runs occur due to the practice of fractional-reserve banking, which was considered a type of fraud in many historical legal systems. The Federal Reserve acts to stabilize and regulate these practices, but if such a system is unstable in the absence of regulation, why should it continue to exist at all?
The Merchant of Venice could be read as one response to this question. Such a reading squares with more fashionable modern readings of Shylock as a kind of hero (a necessary evil whose services the hypocritical Christian characters in the play depend upon but don't wish to acknowledge.)
The more obvious answer is that, otherwise, a lot of capital that could go towards productive (and, of course, unproductive, frivolous, and even exploitative) economic activity gets bound up or worn away in inefficient transactional anxieties (e.g. dickering over how many heads of hog a new copy of Halo is worth.)
Almost taken in by this review myself. Thanks for posting the counterpoint. An online forum working at its best.
Someone recommended looking at 19th c. texts below. In that vein, check out The Education of Henry Adams as this is an issue with which he wrestles insightfully in the wake of the Battle of the Standards and William Jenning's Bryant Cross of Gold and all. Keep in mind that he's writing in advance of the Federal Reserve, but clearly trying to get his head around the idea of what money is exactly or should be.
Also, a warning: he makes some unfortunate impolitic references to Jews. Critical readers like to dismiss these as the reflexive anti-Semitism of any 19th century . There's some justice in that reaction. At the same time, without attempting to apologize for him, such references could also be read as a shorthand (not socially taboo in the way it is today) reference to the advancing political influence of a financial industry beginning to wield the more sophisticated tools of modern capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a Wii but I have another Nintendo product that has made my life healthier: a DS Lite. I make it a point to go to the gym at least 4 times a week. But, my god, is it boring -- even with all the eye candy around.
Get a DS Lite, a gym membership, and a couple good turn-based game (I like Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advanced port and World Series of Poker for the DS side). I usually hit the stairclimber for 30 min and the cycles for 30 min.
10 min on the stairclimber used to feel like 30 min. Now 30 min feels like 5.
Who knew a video game company could end up being such a great promoter of exercise?
Can we get a source (i.e. to the polltaker itself) on the congress figure? I've heard it reported, but I'm curious about the wording of the question. I'm guessing it's approval of congress as a whole. Which is quite different than approval of your particular congressman.
I'm guessing that figure is higher. So that, for most of us, our will is probably being somewhat better reflected at the congressional level -- but we just have a bunch of conflicting wills out there.
Of course, the president is your particular president.
1/6 chance = 16.67% chance. Indeed, not very impressive for London.
Look at this guy's claim for basic audio analysis:
"Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That's my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets."
And that was almost a century ago!
I don't know, I could see a niche for this, especially now that FarkTV has bit the dust.
It's always nice to have a place to go on the internet when I need to see something totally mediocre, get my daily dose of unadulterated contempt and loathing, or just want to be mean myself.
For an excellent end-to-end journalistic account of the subprime bubble, I highly recommend the recent This American Life episode:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355
(Unfortunately, link does not contain a podcast, though it does link to a shorter All Things Considered version of the story.)
An hour-long insightful and comprehensive examination from many different angles.
Well put. Berners-Lee makes an interesting point about what would had happened had the web gone the privatization route a la Gopher.
Another interesting question (which I've asked before) is where would the web be without Gore's vision and support? I imagine, much the same place that Berners-Lee imagined.
Good points. I was joking with a Chinese friend about "evil Chinese" after reading about the online persecution of a Duke student in the NY Times yesterday.
She's not adamantly nationalist or anti-Tibeten but styles herself a pragmatist and thinks the pro-Tibet movement is a waste of time.
She made one point that I have not really heard mentioned elsewhere. She says the human rights issue is beside the point. Tibet is a vital water resource for China and for that reason, China is never going to let it go.
Rather than argue about their right to have the app, they simply pulled it so people wouldn't be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.
That to me would be the bigger story. Some (including myself) were quick to note this very issue in yesterday's thread announcing the new app engine service:
Build you new killer app, have it grow to the point where it takes advantage of the trumpeted scaling features of the service, then helplessly watch it disappear when Google PR feels it's "distracting people from what google wanted them talking about."
(I'm still working on Part I myself and didn't even get a trial account before they cut off new signups. But still...)
Having been burned by this with other Google services, this is my biggest concern about GAPE (is that what we're calling it?), despite what look like rather generous terms of service.
But at no cost, what do I really have to lose?
Well, if it's anything like some other Google sites, your entire site, if (after a couple years or so) they decide to change their terms of service:
http://lastgoogle.blogspot.com/
That said, I'm looking forward to trying this out. But I'm not planning to use it for anything I consider too important or can't keep mirrored on my own system. Be careful.
Then the technique would show up all over the place and get over-exposed.
./ tag likes to put it, nothing of value would be lost. In fact, there's a good chance a lot would be gained. And I'm sure the developer would still be profiting by it.
And then it'd be dropped for the next shiny thing. Or it would prove itself something more than a novelty and get applied in ever more creative ways. Either way, as the
The lack of a patent on putting ink to paper has not seemed to have limited its significance or the ability of people to profit by it. (Though I guess you could argue that there have been restrictions as effective as a patent on it at various times and places throughout history. But rarely if ever for the general good.)
Sadly, as long as pretend-to-do-no-evil giant Google keeps encouraging and rewarding these shady practices, us regular guys are utterly powerless. It would take a tremendous concerted effort to outvote Google with our pitiful dollars.
.com version -- wasn't commercializing it in anyway. Let the registration lapse and it got vacuumed up by a domain farmer. I just registered the .net version. Then after a year, after the farmer probably lost money on it, the .com domain was free again and I re-registered it for a longer period with (what I hope is) a more reliable registrar, Yahoo.
I agree this is the crux of the problem. I wish Google would move against domain farming, but as parent points out, they're the industry leader.
Had a similar thing happen to me with a domain which I was using much like the OP. I had the
OK granted "C-beams" and the Tannhauser Gate whatever that is sounds like total bullshit but that was way better than the graceless and forgettable voiceover from Harrison Ford that followed.
I always thought it was sea beams, which conjures up a slightly more poetic scene. But maybe he was talking about some ass-kick source code he once saw that would have blown Harrison Ford's mind.
I'm with you on the voice-over and its redundancy here.
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary).
I agree that custom plug-ins suck. But before they fix that, they should probably fix that typo:
To see the book pages of ULIB, please dowload free TIFF plugin or DjVu plugin
I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.
I've been wondering the same thing with regards to tablet PCs. One of the most exciting things about OLPC (which I have ordered through their special 1-for-2 program and, interestingly, came out to about $400) is the neat way (in the press release photos anyway), it folds into a sort of e-book. I guess it doesn't have all the same page-like rendering technology as Kindle. But, damn, even with that, the Kindle still looked on the cover of Time little better than a slightly stylized Speak-N-Spell.
If you really feel the need to provide some online persona for an employer, make a new one. Create a cute little profile on all the big social networking sites, and post carefully censored historical details of your life.
Good advice.
Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) is also handy for keeping tabs on what your online aliases are doing while you sleep. Sometimes I'm surprised to discover what they've been up to.
kcrw.com (I just listen to it on the radio, but they have an online counterpart.)
A lot of new (I assume, non-RIAA) music gets filtered to the American mainstream through here (e.g. Coldplay). Jesca Hoop is the latest indie star to come up through their farm system. Also discovered interesting DJ/mashup stuff like The Arbiters there. ("Sure Side of Fame" is a little masterpiece of the genre.)
Unfortunately, I suspect most the unknowns who do really break through eventually end up in the RIAA's net.
I believe Antonio Damasio addresses this question in one of his books. Apparently, a fortunate side-effect of this condition is it impairs the part of your brain that would normally find this horrific and intolerable and leaves you with a weird sense of acceptance and well-being (IIRC). Otherwise, I guess you just blink a lot and hope they keep the feeding tube hooked up.
Woohooo, I hope I still have that box of blank punch cards. I'm going to make a killing on eBay
A box of blank punch cards is actually the only thing I've ever bought off of eBay. I bought them as a Xmas gift for my grandma. She likes to use them as notecards.
My grandpa worked as a programmer in the aerospace industry for years and so she always had stacks of them around the house. Well, he retired about 20 years ago, and a couple years ago she was down to her last stack. So I bought a box for her. She loved it. Best Xmas gift I ever got for her.
A lit major (and a predominantly visual thinker), I'm usually impervious to the assaults of the Grammar Nazi. But this time you got me. :)
(And no need to point out that you're properly referred to as a Diction Nazi.)
In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran mentions this device in his discussion of psychological disorders. IIRC, he compares the sensation to those symptoms that are exhibited by individuals with a messiah complex.
He describes it as excessive emotional "kindling" (often associated with epilepsy -- the tact I believe Scorsese adopted in the Last Temptation of Christ) that leads one to invest spiritual significance in events and experiences most people would experience as ordinary or mundane.
Now place your God Helmet on your head and reread this post -- you'll see what I mean.
The truth is, however, that the most talented probably do the same -- it's just that more of the pointers point to internal locations in their heads instead of urls or indexes of books on their bookshelf. (I suppose there's a RAM / hard drive analogy in there somewhere.)
Then there is the sheer vigor of youth -- did you cram for two weeks before your interview? Me either.
Incidentally, Stephen Jay Gould agreed with you. I remember him in an interview once making a similar distinction in describing his own mental operating system.
I tend to confuse James Randi with Joe Nickell, whom the New Yorker profiled a few years ago (abstract here).
There's a blackly comic incident described in that article: Nickell is walking down some steps at a skeptics conference in the company of a group of skeptics. In a freak accident, he trips and badly breaks his leg. While he's writhing on the ground in pain, the skeptics are standing around him saying things like, "Are you sure it's broken?"
I remember his comment in the article being something like: "Yeah, sometimes you get tired of hanging around skeptics."
You can find a copy here:
Pimps and Dragons
Bank runs occur due to the practice of fractional-reserve banking, which was considered a type of fraud in many historical legal systems. The Federal Reserve acts to stabilize and regulate these practices, but if such a system is unstable in the absence of regulation, why should it continue to exist at all?
The Merchant of Venice could be read as one response to this question. Such a reading squares with more fashionable modern readings of Shylock as a kind of hero (a necessary evil whose services the hypocritical Christian characters in the play depend upon but don't wish to acknowledge.)
The more obvious answer is that, otherwise, a lot of capital that could go towards productive (and, of course, unproductive, frivolous, and even exploitative) economic activity gets bound up or worn away in inefficient transactional anxieties (e.g. dickering over how many heads of hog a new copy of Halo is worth.)
Almost taken in by this review myself. Thanks for posting the counterpoint. An online forum working at its best.
Someone recommended looking at 19th c. texts below. In that vein, check out The Education of Henry Adams as this is an issue with which he wrestles insightfully in the wake of the Battle of the Standards and William Jenning's Bryant Cross of Gold and all. Keep in mind that he's writing in advance of the Federal Reserve, but clearly trying to get his head around the idea of what money is exactly or should be.
Also, a warning: he makes some unfortunate impolitic references to Jews. Critical readers like to dismiss these as the reflexive anti-Semitism of any 19th century . There's some justice in that reaction. At the same time, without attempting to apologize for him, such references could also be read as a shorthand (not socially taboo in the way it is today) reference to the advancing political influence of a financial industry beginning to wield the more sophisticated tools of modern capitalism.